Abstract
Following Bourdieu, this chapter argues that the modern social order is formed in part through the competing investments of the family and the school in social reproduction. If the middle class as a whole rises through schooling, the school nevertheless ensures that some students will fare better than others in its assessments. The chapter considers the contestation between school and family over academic assessment in Elizabethan England, and offers a reading of the famous Latin lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor. In the collision the scene stages among maternal solicitude, sexualized female merriment and pedagogical incompetence, it produces the ‘normal’ as a feeling, a happy acceptance of mediocrity that consoles the middling sort for the individual injuries that must be endured if they are to ‘rise’ as a class.
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Hanson, E. (2019). Normal School: Merry Wives and the Future of a Feeling. In: Loughnane, R., Semple, E. (eds) Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00892-5_3
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